Smiling Back at You

There's a great piece in today's New York Times Magazine by Dexter Filkins (shown at left, filing a story while rockets explode around him in Falluja) who reported from Iraq from 2003 to 2006. When I worked as a reporter, I could never shake that awful feeling that I was intruding on people's lives. And in this passage, Filkins takes that feeling to a horrific extreme:

You go into these places, and you think they’re overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head; keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry, and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear traveling across the wide desert plain. You need a corpse for the newspaper, so you take a bunch of marines to get one. Then suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you have always avoided, smiling back at you as if it knew all along. Your fault.

You can read the whole story right here, which is also a preview of Filkins's forthcoming book, The Forever War.